Monday Afternoon Crew Chief: Whizzer of Oz

It’s amazing what confidence will do for a racing driver. After a couple of pretty sloppy drives in the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix, Mark Webber pulled it together at Barcelona last week to lead all the way after starting from pole position, comprehensively outdriving his more highly touted teammate, Sebastian Vettel. One week later […]

Mark Gillies

May 17, 2010

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It’s amazing what confidence will do for a racing driver. After a couple of pretty sloppy drives in the Australian and Chinese Grands Prix, Mark Webber pulled it together at Barcelona last week to lead all the way after starting from pole position, comprehensively outdriving his more highly touted teammate, Sebastian Vettel. One week later at F1’s glamour event, the Monaco GP, Webber did the same thing: This time, he drove off into the distance in a manner that was reminiscent of a Senna or a Stewart or a Clark in their pomp.

It’s always difficult to know what to make of Webber, partly because he didn’t have the same kind of spoon-fed path up the career ladder that the likes of Lewis Hamilton or Fernando Alonso or even Vettel enjoyed. Webber never ran for a true front-running team in Formula 3 and had to seek employment in sports cars—admittedly with Mercedes-Benz, who were keen to put him in Indycars thereafter—before hooking up with Paul Stoddart to run in F3000. Even there, he looked good rather than great, and it was only because fellow Australian Stoddart purchased Minardi that he got a ride in F1.

Prior to 2009, he had spent a season with Minardi, two with Jaguar Racing, two with Williams, and two with a Red Bull team that was starting to gel. He had never been in a front-running car, which made it difficult to gauge just how good he is, except he had a tendency to blow off his teammates in qualifying and was regarded as a solid racer. But last year, the team came alive, and Webber did a really good job during the second half of the season. Over the course of the year, Vettel did even better, but it’s worth remembering that Webber broke his leg in the 2008–2009 off-season and that must have hampered his preparation, most notably his fitness regimen.

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In lots of ways, Webber reminds me of Jack Brabham, his countryman who won three world drivers’ titles in 1959, 1960, and 1966. Like Brabham, Webber is a hard racer who takes no prisoners and he had to graft to get to F1. And I think that both drivers are sorely underrated. “Black Jack” raced against and beat some of the best ever, men like Stirling Moss, Tony Brooks, Dan Gurney, Jochen Rindt, Jim Clark, and Jackie Stewart, yet few critics hold him in the same lofty regard despite his three titles. I once asked Brabham if he felt sore about the lack of critical acclaim and he just grinned and said, “Can’t have been all that bad, can I?” Webber, too, has beaten the likes of Schumacher, Button, Hamilton, Alonso, and Vettel, so he can’t be too bad, either.

This will probably put the hex on Webber, but it would nice if the hard-working but underappreciated Aussie can become the third world champion from Down Under, along with Brabham and Alan Jones. It would also be good to see one of F1’s elder statesmen putting it to the 20-somethings who seem to make up most of the grid.